Can Reacting to the Past Help Students Learn about the Israel/Palestine Conflict?

by David Austin Walsh

Mr. Walsh is the Assistant Editor of HNN.

The beginning of a new decade always seems to be a time of anniversaries.  Reacting to the Past, the interactive teaching program developed at Barnard College by American historian Mark C. Carnes, is hosting its Tenth Annual Summer Institute at Barnard from June 10-13, 2010.  The meeting provides opportunity for teachers at the forty colleges and universities where Reacting courses are taught to come together to develop new curriculum and for schools interested in implementing Reacting to learn more about the program (and even play a few Reacting games).

Reacting to the Past (RTTP) consists of elaborate games set during critical historical events, some ancient, such as Threshold of Democracy: Athens in 403 B.C., Confucianism and the Succession Crisis of Wanli Emperor; and some modern, like Defining a Nation: India on the Eve of Independence 1945, and a yet-to-be-published simulation of the Peel Commission in Mandate Palestine in 1937 entitled The Struggle for Palestine.  This game, written by Natasha Gill in consultation with a number of Israeli and Palestinian academics, is still in development, but it has been tested by students at Barnard College, in a class led by Ms. Gill herself, and at Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa.